


Bound in Blood

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Brief reference to violence, Canon Era, Gen, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Spoilers for Chapters 69-71
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 10:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4475576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He should say something to her about it, he realizes. Will she be as forgiving as Eren of someone who kept his own counsel from her? He doubts it.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bound in Blood

He should say something to her about it, he realizes.

He doesn’t. Not right away. It’s a hectic few months: the coronation, the transfer of power, the arrests and trials of the recalcitrant nobles and the survivors of the MP Brigade, the triumph of the new titan-killing machine, the distribution of the light-giving crystals, keeping a close eye on Eren after he runs through his new regimen of exercises.

And, of course, the planning of the royal orphanages. When you’re asked to inform those plans by drawing upon your own memories as an orphan — the squalor, the hunger, the casual contempt of those around you, the ever-present fear that lies buried alongside your mother under a meter-deep stratum of impassivity — it’s easy to forget that, actually, you still have kin.

Then there’s the fact that he’s not sure what _to_ tell her. They’re related, almost certainly. How, he has no idea, other than that it’s through her father and not her mother. Obviously.

Did Kenny know? He had to have. The entire MP not only knew she existed but knew she was capable of killing a man at the age of nine. That plus her surname would have rung bells in the head of even the stupidest motherfucker. And Kenny, whatever else he was, was not stupid.

On the other hand, Kenny never mentioned her once to him. Not on the rooftop, not in the saloon, not under that tree. Sure, they had more… pressing things to discuss, each of those times. Still. He recalls, too, that Kenny’s squad had no idea who she was, even when she was grinding the life out of one of them against the cavern wall.

_Either way… thanks, asshole, for running out on me one last fucking time._

He figures she’s had to have guessed. People know she’s strong, almost as strong as he is. They don’t know, or they forget, that she’s brilliant too. He noted her intelligence stats after she joined the Corps: just a point shy of Armin Arlert’s. She knows her name links her to Kenny. She knows the three of them are linked by a sudden, inexplicable surge of life-altering power.

People don’t know, or they forget, that she’s almost as smart as Armin because hers is not an intelligence demonstrated in words but in motion. And she keeps her own counsel, much like him. The world is cruel. Those you entrust with your secrets can turn on you. Or die. Or just walk away.

So he hasn’t caught her staring at him in the weeks since they took Rod Reiss down. He imagines she’s been scrutinizing him surreptitiously, though, just as he’s been doing to her. He’s been doing that from the moment she shot to her feet in the courtroom. The points of her nose and cheeks call to mind his own reflection in the mirror. They speak of Kenny, too, and of his mother, whose half-faded image he carries around in his head like a water-warped daguerrotype. Even in the shape of her eyes, so radically different from any he’s seen outside of a heretical book, there’s a familiar narrowness that owes nothing to the folds of her lids.

 _Clan,_ was the word she had from her father. He wonders if there are more of him and her and his mother and her father and Kenny out there, submerged in the Underground or in the forests that are ever thinning away under the pressures of human population. Guileless hicks or filthy urchins one trauma away from human weaponhood.

He remembers that transition far too well for his own liking. Raw terror transmuted into raw power and rage, big men’s bodies turned to limp rags and dripping meat in his small hands. And a new fear to bury alongside the others: that he’d come to enjoy it.

He tries to tell himself that whatever relation they are, it’s probably not a close one. Not a very close one, anyway. First cousins… maybe. Did his mother and Kenny have other siblings? Would they have denied, would they still deny, any kinship to a mass murderer and to a whore? Would Kenny have even bothered to bring up the subject to him, in their final conversations?

Is there anyone else left in the world who can answer his questions? He thinks about a basement, one as unattainable as the sea or the wide plains of sand illustrated in those heretical books. Until now. He hopes. The world outside Rose is still full of towering dangers, some of which fought and slept and drank alongside his squad. Their access to the royal coffers, the swelling of their ranks with beaming new recruits, don’t change that fact. If anything, they make it easier to forget and thereby more of a danger.

But they’ve done a thousand impossible things in the last half-year. They can reach Shiganshina. They can dig through the ruins of the house owned by the first man to have come from outside the walls. Nobody is sure what they’ll find, not even that man’s only child. He suspects, though, that the Jaegers aren’t the only family whose secrets will open up to them, as a lock opens to its long-lost key.

He’s been thinking he should tell her before then. He decides after their conversation with Shadis. The ex-commander is a man who kept his own counsel for the last three and more years. It turned out to be to no one’s avail, least of all his own.

Eren, surprisingly, had no sharp words for him. But Eren is shellshocked, kinless, desperate for any scrap of memory, and Shadis gave him a full bolt of it. (Will Eren, too, turn out to have kin he didn’t know? Monstrous kin, intent on using him or destroying him along with everyone he loves?)

Will she be as forgiving as Eren of someone who kept his own counsel from her? He doubts it.

So, late the next morning, he seeks her out and finds her just where he sent her: in the fields behind the castle, retraining the defectors from the Garrison and the MP on titan dummies they bought from the Trainee Legion. He watches her as she watches them, breaking her gaze only to jot down notes on a clipboard. Each pass through the obstacle course concludes with the newbie landing on his or her feet in front of her. She speaks calmly to them then, praising what they did right, pointing out what they did wrong, explaining how to right it. Their faces brighten and fall and narrow with intent. They want, he sees immediately, to earn nothing more than a _Well done, cadet_ from her.

She will, before the month is out, make a fine squad leader. Someday she will make an even finer captain.

When she calls for them all to take fifteen and the newer recruits wander away chattering and rubbing muscles no longer used to this exercise, he walks in her direction. She turns long before he reaches her, despite the babble around them. Her ears are attuned to the slightest of sounds, thanks to a truncated childhood in the forest and a premature adulthood on the battlefield.

“Mikasa,” Levi says as he comes up to her. “Drop by my office at fifteen hundred hours. We need to talk.”


End file.
